Enlarge ImageRequest to buy this photoVirginia Mayo | Associated PressPhotographs of people who arrived at Ellis Island, N.Y., after leaving Antwerp, Belgium, are part of the exhibits at the museum.

ANTWERP, Belgium — When young Sonia Pressman Fuentes stepped aboard the Westernland II ship in
Antwerp with her family on April 20, 1934, it was the biggest leap she would ever take.

“It made it possible for me to be alive — very simple answer. Otherwise we would have been
killed,” the Jewish feminist leader said, recalling her family’s flight from the Nazis.

“The Red Star Line saved all our lives.”

Fuentes was back at the original docks of this huge North Sea port for the opening of the Red
Star Line migration museum, which shows how millions of Europeans steamed across the ocean toward
the United States and other parts of the Americas during the past two centuries.

It charts the migrations of everyone who traveled on the shipping line, from composer Irving
Berlin and scientist Albert Einstein to Israeli politician Golda Meir. It is the story of countless
people escaping poverty, seeking adventure, avoiding persecution or dodging certain death.

“What we are trying to achieve with the museum is to bring back all the stories of lives that
were changed here,” said museum project coordinator Luc Verheyen.

More than 2 million passengers sailed from Europe to America between 1873 and 1934 on the Red
Star Line.

Nobel Prize winner Einstein was one among those millions. When he was on the Belgenland II in
1933, he learned that the Nazis had confiscated his possessions so he decided not to return to
Berlin. Instead, he used Red Star Line stationery to declare his resignation from the Prussian
Academy for the Sciences.

The museum highlights the eternal struggle of migration — a lesson as true today as it was
decades ago.